What if I told you one of the chief invitations of Christianity is desire?

You see, sadly, often what takes center stage in many Christian circles is duty, obligation, busyness, pressure, guilt, etc. These become the hallmarks of what it means to follow Jesus. What gets lost is the deep, core, human longing of desire. Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Even Jesus himself in Matthew 20:32 asks two blind men, “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus isn’t being sarcastic, he’s appealing to desire. Why? Jesus knew that if he gets our hearts, he gets everything. We weren’t made for compliance; we were made to desire—deeply.

We get a great picture of God’s heart for us to recapture our heart’s desires in the book Song of Songs. At first glance, the casual Bible reader might blush, write it off as too scandalous, or certainly try to explain it away as something other than what it is. In Song of Songs, Solomon is writing of a real (or hypothetical) physical and sexual relationship (the answer not weighing heavily on its ultimate meaning). The female in the story says in verse 2, “I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking: “Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one.” This sounds like anything but duty or obligation. This sounds like pure, unashamed love and passion, full of desire.

This is just one of many passages throughout chapters five and six. Just when you think it’s over, there’s more desire to come. Rather than write this off as not very spiritual, or even assume it’s nice for the married couples among us, we can dig deeper and ask the bigger question: why are books and passages like this included in Scripture? For one big reason among many others—God has filled each of us with desire. And rather than being some prude who seeks to take away our joy, please, and fulfillment, God is instead the creator intimacy, love, and desire—sexual and otherwise. Who is this God? One who has held nothing back in giving us wonderful gifts to be enjoyed within his boundaries.

Questions for reflection:

  1. What is your first response when reading chapters five and six of Song of Songs? Are you tempted to brush it aside and unimportant or irrelevant? Why?
  2. What do you find relatable about the back and forth conversation and relationship between the man and woman in these chapters? Regardless of your relationship status, what commonalities do you find in this relationship and your own, or those around you?